A Rational Basis for Hope: Human Behavior Modeling and Climate Change

While climate models have rapidly advanced in sophistication over recent decades, they lack dynamic representation of human behavior and social systems despite strong feedbacks between social processes and climate. The impacts of climate change alter perceptions of risk and emissions behavior that, in turn, influence the rate and magnitude of climate change. Addressing this deficiency in climate models requires a substantial interdisciplinary effort to couple models of climate and human behavior. I will discuss efforts by a group of highly-interdisciplinary collaborators to create linked models of human behavior, risk perception and global climate. Our results indicate that inclusion of human behavioral change arising from the perception and experience of extreme events could have large impacts on temperature trajectories. Furthermore, uncertainties in global temperature trajectories arising from impacts of human behavior are similar in magnitude to those arising from uncertainties of the physical components of climate models.Non UBCUnreviewedAuthor affiliation: University of Tennessee, KnoxvilleFacult